YOU’VE woken up to the news… yeah we’re out. We played well but we lost. Yet another honourable loss. Whoop-de-doo.

Signs were bad for the Socceroos early on when Craig Foster predicted we would win. A good tactic most Australian’s have when enjoying the world game is to disagree with everything Fossie says so his prediction did put an early dampener on the night.

Despite that bad omen there was cause for optimism within the Australian fans. All the reasons pointed to an Aussie win: Peru had nothing to play for except pride, and they were without their best player in Jefferson Farfan!

Australia would pull out a plucky performance because that’s what we as a nation do!

Then when Peru took the field wearing red with white sashes, all Australians felt a huge subconscious confidence as our opponents now resembled a Melbourne Heart away team. We couldn’t lose! Could we?

Course we bloody could. This is the FIFA World Cup. Throughout history we’ve won 2 matches out of 16. It’s a cruel sport. The sort of cruelty we Australians aren’t really used to, and we live in a country designed to kill us.

The boys in gold started strong, they were fired up! Mile Jedinak called for a penalty in the 5th minute claiming the Peruvian defender Anderson Santamaria struck the ball with his arm, replays showed it bounced off his crotch.

Mistaking his crotch for his arm was actually quite the compliment of Santamaria’s manhood, stupidly this gave the Peruvian defender confidence and he played quite well for the rest of the match.

Australia dominated play for the first 15 minutes, then Peru began predicting our tactics a little better. One tactic that wasn’t ideal was when a long ball was put into the Peru forward half Trent Sainsbury spilled it straight to the feet of Paolo Guerrero, who then passed the ball to Andre Carrillo who scored a belter. Australia 0-1 Peru.

From the sidelines Peruvian manager Ricardo Gareca cheered loudly. Gareca who looks so much like a villain from a 1980s action movie I expected Steven Seagal to appear and snap his neck. SBS Special comments man Craig Moore gave us false hope that it was going to be reviewed as offside, but alas no.

Australia continued playing as the better side for the remainder of the first half, with some great chances coming through Rogic and Mooy; but at the half we frustratingly still trailed 1-0. What doesn’t help is because SBS didn’t expect to be broadcasting every single group game, they only sold a certain amount of ads meaning we’re seeing the same commercials every bloody night.

How anyone can be annoyed by Lucy Zelic pronouncing names properly considering we have to hear the TAB head vs heart fans “chanting” to the tune of Countdown Races every break is beyond all human reason.

When Guerrero scored Peru’s second goal five minutes into the second half the sound of casual Socceroos fans switching off and going to bed was heard all the way in New Zealand. Now it was only the true believers remaining. Ironically it was at this point that Bert Van Marwijk did what all the casual fans had been screaming for, he brought on Tim Cahill. Timmy did bring some energy to the Socceroos, but they still lacked finesse. Chance after chance was squandered. Then to rub salt into the wounds the commentators turned to the Socceroos future and reminded us that after this match Graham Arnold would be our national coach again.

In the 84th minute Mathew Leckie had a great chance but forgot to actually shoot the ball and the keeper collected it with ease. Summed up Australia’s night perfectly.

As our hopes agonizingly died the post mortems began and David Basheer pointed out that Australia have conceded a goal in every World Cup Final they’ve played since 1974. “Conceding goals has been the Socceroos’ achilles heel” and suddenly I pined for the buffering wheel of Optus Sports.

The final score was Australia 0-2 Peru. It didn’t matter that we lost because France and Denmark drew 0-0 which meant even if we had won we wouldn’t have got through. Bloody Northern Hemisphere, they ruin everything.

So farewell World Cup 2018! We’ll watch the rest of you, but in that bitter way you look at ex’s wedding photos on Facebook. To my fellow fans of the round ball game, I offer this as solace: we did better than those cheatin’ Italians.